Diablo 3 Nominated for BAFTAs

Hot on the heels of the BAFTA awards this week the organisation has announced that the Games BAFTAs will take place on 5th March in the UK and the good news for Blizzard is that Diablo 3 has been nominated in two categories, best music and oddly enough, best strategy.

I have no idea why Diablo 3 would appear in the best strategy section but the fact it’s not a strategy indicates it is unlikely to win in that category. However, there isn’t a Role Playing category.

Comments

In their defense the game is heavy on strategy and rather light on action/skill. Only people with a good financial strategy when navigating the AH (and the forums) will end up with the best gear in the end even if they have no skill whatsoever when it comes to the action aspects. Since ending up with the best gear is the whole point of the game it can be considered a strategy game.

I really agree with you.. The music is mediocre but the real issue is that most of the time it’s not there at all. Only enviroment sound and repetitive voices. There’s no option to change/adjust it to your liking, for god’s sake!
You get rare items more often than you get to hear the soundtrack 🙂

I agree on the music and remain baffled with the sound design of D3. The music is great, if you listen to the sound track or the MP3 samples, but like others say, you never hear it in teh game. Just tinks of dripping water and wind sounds and crickets and such. I have the ambient turned way down and the music turned way up and I still hardly ever notice any music, on the rare occasions I don’t have some music of my own playing anyway.

I’ve asked Matt about this several times, even in person and completely off the record, (where he’s usually very forthcoming with all sorts of cool stuff I can’t repeat publicly) but he’s way too professional to bite or say anything negative about the totally different sound design in D3… even if he felt negative about it. Which he insists that he does not, even though it’s very different (and so subtle/quiet) than his own sound design on D1/D2/TL1/TL2/etc.

Clearly these nominations were made through the same random number generator Blizzard uses for item drops.
Diablo 3 as strategy is far from being the worst one. At least you can argue that there is a tiny bit of tactical gameplay in terms of using abilities to kill various enemies. Or something.

But seriously, look at that list:

Game Innovation
Call of Duty: Black Ops II

The game series that is the poster-child for annualized copy/paste game designing nominated for innovation? Really?
Regardless of what one might think about CoD in general, that has to be meant as a joke.

Some of the other Strategy game nominations are kinda weird too. BAFTA probably 1) has a very different concept of strategy or 2) Trying to circumvent the fact that there was like 1 strategy game released in 2012 (Xcom. And apparently also Great Big War Game, Total War Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai…)